Sexual violence in the humanitarian aid community has been a problem for decades, says Alicia Jones at the in Pasadena, California – but it is rarely discussed.

“I think most survivors fear the scrutiny that will be applied to them. Many fear that they will be blamed at least in part for what happened,” she says. “The cultural stigma around this issue still exists in every country, and in some cases reporting to local authorities may be unsafe.”

The Headington Institute is developing a research project that aims to uncover the true scale of the problem, as well as bolstering the response of relevant agencies. It isn’t alone. A separate campaign, Report The Abuse – run by the in Vancouver, Canada – launched in August and is independently conducting a survey to examine the prevalence of assaults.

Jones gave a talk last month at the in London, where she outlined some initial findings from surveys of aid workers that the Headington Institute has conducted over the past five years.

Some 10 per cent of the 1439 aid workers that the Headington Institute surveyed reported being forced into unwanted sexual contact. Three-quarters of those reporting an incident were female. When the Headington researchers examined a sub-set of 1108 aid workers from 37 countries, they found that four in 10 had experienced two or more unwanted incidents.

Reporting difficulties

But few of these incidents are recorded in official statistics. In July, the and used data from the Aid Worker Security Database to build an of violence against aid workers. The graph shows that around 3000 national staff and 540 international staff have been attacked – but of these, only 17 international staff and six national staff have reported experiencing sexual violence.

Jones says the intensely personal nature of sexual assault makes it extremely difficult to report in a workplace setting. In addition, many people fear they will lose their job, or that reporting will not have beneficial results.

“We know that, universally, victims of rape and sexual assault carry a huge sense of self blame,” says Anya Charnaud at , a network of specialist sexual assault referral centres across London.

The response of aid organisations has, in general, been less than supportive, says Jones – which can be a problem. Charnaud says that sexual violence carries serious and lasting physical and psychological effects such as increased anxiety, poor sleep, disgust, shame, fear, guilt and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We have a moral obligation to make sure that those who tell the truth about sexual assault in our agencies are themselves helped in the process,” says Jones. “Fundamentally it’s not just about data – there is much more at stake.”

(Image: European Pressphoto Agency b.v./Alamy)

A step forward for equal LGBT rights in Africa. Last week, the influential Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) published a study on .

A comprehensive review of recent scientific papers on the subject, it concluded that sexual behaviour is naturally varied, and discrimination unjustified. It stated that there is no evidence that orientation can be altered by therapy or that being gay is contagious.

The report also sets straight the idea that homosexuality is a Western malaise: “There is no basis for the view that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ either in the sense of it being a ‘colonial import’, or on the basis that prevalence of people with same-sex or bisexual orientations is any different in African countries compared to countries on any other continent.”

Going further, the report asserted not only that tolerance of sexual diversity benefits communities but it positively affects public health, civil society and long-term economic growth.

Zero tolerance

Launched at the in Durban, the study comes a year after the Ugandan government passed a law imposing a life sentence on anyone who has sexual relations with someone of the same sex. Other countries, including Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria, then passed similar anti-gay laws.

ASSAf president Daya Reddy is hopeful that the report may be a step towards change on the continent. “I expect there to be interest not only among policy-makers but also from across civil society,” he says.

African voice

The report also calls for more research, including a large-scale study looking at “the prevalence, genetic patterns and familial association of gender and sexual diversity”.

“By doing science in Africa on sexual diversity, we will get an authentic African voice,” says co-author Glenda Gray of the South African Medical Research Council.

It’s not surprising that the report is a South African initiative. The country’s post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Gray hopes the report will have a similar impact to earlier ASSAf consensus studies, like the one debunking the notion that , which pushed the South African government to take a more scientific stance on the issue.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a prime target. In March the government announced that it was in talks with UNESCO about redrawing the borders of Virunga National Park to allow exploration, after the discovery of oil and gas there. The park is a World Heritage Site, home to hundreds of rare mountain gorillas and other endangered wildlife.

Redrawing borders would be a backward step. Lake Edward, in the area that would be most affected, provides more than 50,000 people with fresh water, food and jobs. They are aware of the potential for accidents and are rightly nervous that the lake’s fragile ecosystem will be ruined. There’s much that can go wrong, including water, soil and air pollution from pipeline leaks, oil spills, gas flaring, dumping and sabotage. We need look no further than the mess Royal Dutch Shell made in Nigeria’s Niger Delta for evidence of this. Oil trade in the area might also worsen and be vulnerable to armed rebel activity.

“The necessity is to find a middle ground to preserve nature, but also to gain profit from resources so the communities living there can see their living conditions get better,” the country’s prime minister, Matata Ponyo, told the BBC. But Virunga is, in principle, non-negotiable. UNESCO has said that oil and gas exploration is not compatible with World Heritage status.

In addition, better standards of living promised via income from oil and gas extraction rarely materialise in Africa and most communities end up worse off than before. Oil won’t provide many jobs for residents or a significant boost to the local economy.

“Better standards of living promised via income from oil and gas extraction rarely materialise in Africa”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Borderline decisions”

Thick armour and jaws packed full of teeth aren’t the only defences that alligators and crocodiles have. They also have formidable immune systems and some of the protective molecules that enable this have now been identified. Their discovery in the blood of the American alligator might even pave the way for a new generation of antibiotics.

Crocodilians have existed on Earth for at least 37 million years. Over the course of their evolution, they have developed a very strong defence against infection. “They inflict wounds on each other from which they frequently recover without complications from infection despite the fact that the environments in which they live are less than sterile,” says Barney Bishop of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, co-author of the new study.

American alligators have an enviable innate immune system, the “primitive” first line of defence that is shared by all vertebrates. In 2008, . The germ-killing molecules were identified as enzymes that break down a type of lipid.

Although their results have yet to lead to any new antibiotics, enzymes aren’t the only pathogen-busting molecules that alligators have up their sleeve. Bishop’s group has now identified and isolated peptides known as a CAMPs or cationic antimicrobial peptides.

Fishing with charges

These molecules are positively charged so the team developed nanoparticles to electrostatically pick them out of the complex mix of proteins in alligator blood plasma.

In total, the group fished out 45 peptides. Of these, they chemically synthesised eight and evaluated their antimicrobial properties. Five killed some of the E.coli bacteria they were presented with, while the other three destroyed most of the E.coli and also showed some activity against bacteria including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can cause inflammation and sepsis, and Staphylococcus aureus, which can trigger skin infections, sinusitis and food poisoning. So far, the strains have performed well, says Bishop.

The researchers are now extending their analysis to other members of the crocodilian family including gharials and Siamese crocodiles.

Identifying novel antimicrobial peptides is urgently needed because of the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, says Guangshun Wang at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. “Because of the novelty of the sequences,” he says, “these peptides provide new templates for developing antimicrobials to combat superbugs.”

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